The Motivators and Values Index (MVI)

The Motivators and Values Index (MVI)

Need to know what gets an employee or candidate out of bed in the morning? The MVI Index measures and individuals motivators scores versus a national average for 7 motivators or values:

Aesthetic: The aesthetic person sees the highest value in beauty, form and harmony.

Altruistic: The highest value for the altruistic person is love of people.

Economic: The economic person is characteristically interested in money and what is useful.

Individualistic: The individualistic person seeks to be separate and independent. Freedom is very important.

Political: The political person is interested primarily in power and control.

Regulatory: The highest value of the regulatory person may be called unity, order or rightness.

Theoretical: The dominant interest of the theoretical person is the discovery of theoretical and objective truth.

The Motivators and Values Index (MVI)
Ever want to identify the main passions or drivers someone has to see if the are in alignment with their job? What makes your leader or employee get out the bed in the morning?

The Motivators and Values Index (MVI) is the latest interpretation of the work of Drs. Eduard Spranger and Gordon Allport and their study of human value, motivation and drive. The MVI is the most contemporary interpretation of these theories available on the market today.

It brings with it many new and powerful features that differentiate it from other values based instruments. Some of these refinements include: increased reliability and validity, an easier-to-use testing interface and expanded dimensions to separate two historically merged factors into unique pieces.

The MVI helps people to better understand their unique value hierarchy or belief system pertaining to what motivates them, what they are most drawn to and where their passions lie. Such knowledge helps an individual become more effective in several key areas of their life, including but not limited to:

·         Setting and achieving goals that are inspirational
·         Creating roles that align well with motivations
·         Job selection
·         Performance management

The History of Values

In 1914 German philosopher and psychologist Eduard Spranger published a book in German titled, Lebensformen (later translated into English in 1928 as, Types of Men: the Psychology and Ethics of Personality). In it, he described his research and observations that lead to his identifying six core attitudes or values he found present in every person.

These six values were what he believed created motivation and drive in an individual, and he defined them as, “world views or filters that shape and define that which a person finds valuable, important, good or desirous.”

Values are formed through repeated experiences and multiple exposure to your world. Your experiences help determine your attitude or beliefs about what is valuable or good and what is not. The more positive the encounters associated with any dimension, the more reinforced that dimension comes as being valuable and good. Conversely, the more negative the encounters the less reinforced the dimension becomes.

Due to their connection with experiences and environment, our Values are dynamic. With enough time or experience an individual’s value hierarchy can change. It is, however, very slow to change outside of a significant emotional event or crisis. This is why it is so important that people understand their motivators and drivers since they are primarily static.

In the 1950’s American psychologist Gordon Allport picked up the mantle left by Spranger and became one of the first psychologists to really focus on personality in the United States. He rejected both Freud’s psychoanalytic approach to personality, which he thought went too deep, and Marston’s behavioral approach, which he thought often did not go deep enough.

He placed the most importance on the uniqueness of each individual,
and the importance of the present context, as opposed to past history, for understanding the personality.

Allport believed that an individual’s personality is largely founded upon people’s values, or basic convictions that they hold about what is and is not of real importance in life.

From this assumption, he began to work off of Spranger’s findings outlining six major value types.

Working from Spranger’s model, Allport and his two partners created the first values Instrument to allow for measuring a person’s value hierarchy (the Allport Vernon Lindzey Study of Values 1956). In so doing, Allport replaced Spranger’s original Political dimension with the Individualistic dimension, which he felt was more accurate.

It is important to note that this was more than simply a name change. The Individualistic dimension is its own category, separate and discrete, from the Political dimension hypothesized by Spranger. Allport took the original Political dimension out and inserted the Individualistic dimension in its place.

In creating the IMX Values Index, we decided that both Spranger’s and Allport’s work - each having merit – needn’t be mutually exclusive, so the decision was made to have a profile that measured both dimensions independently. As a result, the new MVI profile has seven dimensions instead of six.

Along with retaining both dimensions, the new MVI also replaces Spranger’s original Religious with the Regulatory dimension. Unlike the substitution of Individualistic for Political, this is not a replacement, rather a name and instrument change. To comply with contemporary EEOC demands, it is not favorable to have a profile that asks specific questions about one’s religious preferences, nor is it really an accurate representation of what the dimension can be about anyway.

The seven dimensions of values in the IMX Values Index profile include:

Aesthetic: The aesthetic person sees the highest value in form and harmony. Each experience is judged from the standpoint of grace, symmetry, or fit. He regards life as a procession of events; each event enjoyed for its own sake. He need not be a creative artist, nor need he be decadent; he is aesthetic if he but finds his chief interest in the beauty of life. The aesthetic attitude is, in a sense, diametrically opposed to the theoretical; the former is concerned with the diversity, and the latter with the understanding of experience. The aesthetic person either chooses, with Keats, to consider truth as equivalent to beauty, or agrees with Mencken, that, ‘to make a thing charming is a million times more important than to make it true’. In the economic sphere the aesthetic person sees the process of manufacturing, advertising, and trade as a wholesale destruction of the values most important to him.

Altruistic: The highest value for the altruistic person is love of people. In this dimension it is the altruistic or philanthropic aspect of love that is measured. The altruistic person prizes other persons as ends, and is therefore herself kind, sympathetic, and unselfish.

She is likely to find the theoretical or economic attitudes cold and inhuman. In contrast to the political type, the altruistic person regards love as itself the only suitable form of human relationship.

Economic: The economic person is characteristically interested in what is useful. Based originally upon the satisfaction of bodily needs (self-preservation), the interest in utilities develops to embrace the practical affairs of the business world—the production, marketing, and consumption of goods, the elaboration of credit, and the accumulation of tangible wealth. This type is thoroughly practical and conforms well to the prevailing stereotype of the business person.

More than perhaps any other, the economic attitude frequently comes into conflict with other values. The economic person wants education to be practical, and regards unapplied knowledge [often sought by the theoretical person] as waste. Great feats of engineering and application result from the practical demands economic people make upon science and theory. The value of utility likewise conflicts with the aesthetic value except when art serves commercial ends. In his personal life the economic person is likely to confuse luxury with beauty. In his relations with people he is more likely to be interested in surpassing them in wealth than in dominating them (political attitude) or in serving them (altruistic attitude). In some instances he may have regard for the regulatory attitudes, but inclines to consider it as a means to rewards of wealth, prosperity, and other tangible blessings.

Individualistic: The individualistic person seeks to be separate and independent. Her desire is to stand out, to express her uniqueness and be granted freedom over her actions to champion her own bearing. Unlike the political attitude, the individualistic person seeks neither power nor control of others or the environment in general. She is only concerned with controlling her own fate and protecting her own sovereignty. The individual person rails against his subjugation by any external force and when she feels so her only focus becomes her own emancipation.

Political: The political person is interested primarily in power and control. His activities are not necessarily within the narrow field of politics, but whatever his vocation, he betrays himself as a Machtmensch (i.e., control freak.) Leaders in any field generally have high power and control values. Since competition and struggle play a large part in all life, many philosophers have seen power as the most universal and most fundamental of motives. There are, however, certain personalities in whom the desire for a direct expression of this motive is uppermost, who wish above all else for personal power, influence, and renown.

Regulatory: The highest value of the regulatory person may be called unity. She is mystical and seeks to comprehend the cosmos as a whole and to relate herself to its embracing totality. The regulatory person is one whose mental attitude is directed towards achieving structure and is permanently directed to the creation of the highest and absolutely satisfying value of order and constitution. Some of this type find their life’s value in the affirmation of life’s systems or processes and in active participation therein.

The ‘traditionalist’ seeks to unite herself with a higher order – to be one with the system.

Theoretical: The dominant interest of the theoretical person is the discovery of theoretical and objective truth. In the pursuit of this goal he characteristically takes a ‘cognitive’ attitude, one that looks for identities and differences; one that divests itself of judgments regarding the beauty orutility of objects, and seeks only to observe, reason and understand. Since the interests of the theoretical are empirical, critical, and rational, he is necessarily an intellectualist, frequently a scientist or philosopher. His chief aim in life is to gain, order and systematize his knowledge.

Understanding what drives you, what motivates you, what inspires and is deemed important by you is a vital first step in improving performance, satisfaction, and job alignment in any person’s life.

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